A place where I'll post up some thoughts and ideas - especially on literature in education, children's literature in general, poetry, reading, writing, teaching and thoughts on current affairs.

Wednesday, 16 September 2015

Why Labour politicians attacking Corbyn over National Anthem deprives us of liberty

Labour politicians attacking Corbyn over the National Anthem may be nasty, may be disloyal but it says something else to me. It also shows me that these people haven't even got the guts to take up a position on the basis of a) freedom of conscience and b) the memory of the thousands of people who died in WW2 who were atheists and/or republicans...and irony of ironies, almost all of whom would have voted Labour in 1945, if they had been alive.

So, what this means is that these people in the Labour Party can't even defend their own ground. They can't defend liberty. And they can't defend many of the kind of people who vote for them.

Instead they hope that by wrapping themselves in the flag and the so-called 'decency' of wearing immaculate clothes, that this will win them the affection of the right-wing press. It doesn't. Miliband appeared in public in immaculate outfits and sang the National Anthem loud and long. In effect, all this won him was the accolade, 'Geek in a suit' or worse - 'or 'Son of Jewish traitor wears suit'.

And in a small way, their collaboration with this chorus deprives us of our liberty. People we thought could and would protect our freedom of conscience, and our right to wear what we want are saying, 'No we won't.'